Reagan expert on Trump budget: “No way!”

Martin D. Weiss Ph.D. | Monday, July 10, 2017 at 7:30 am

In his first budget proposal in May, President Trump promised deep tax cuts without reducing federal revenue, a 10% hike in military spending without adding to the deficit, $1 trillion in new infrastructure spending, and a balanced federal budget in 10 years.

Wall Street rejoiced. The Dow surged to 21,529. And it’s still holding near that peak level. But this summer, Trump troubles are starting to hit from three sides.

Trump Trouble #1No Economic Boom

There’s only one “secret sauce” that might have made the Trump budget possible: An accelerated pace of growth in the U.S. economy.

The recipe was classic Reaganomics: Deregulation and tax cuts boost U.S. GDP growth to 3% or even 4%. The extra growth comes with a surge in corporate profits. That profit-surge then drives a new wave of tax revenues into the coffers of the U.S. Treasury Department. And the new tax revenues are more than enough to finance the Trump promises.

Can that still happen? According to David Stockman, budget director under Ronald Reagan and sometimes dubbed the Father of Reagonomics, “no way.”

“I see no way that’s going to remotely happen,” says Stockman. He points out that the White House is depending on the continuation of an economic expansion that’s already among the longest in American history. “It assumes you’re going to go 206 months without a recession, which has never happened,” Stockman concludes.

Meanwhile, adding its voice to the fray, the International Monetary Fund has just slashed its forecasts for the U.S. economy. Why? Precisely because of disappointment regarding Trump’s version of Reaganomics.

The IMF saga started earlier this year when its economists were apparently more optimistic about the Trump tax cuts. They said that, thanks to Trump’s fiscal plans, the U.S. economy would get a boost in 2017 to 2.3% annual growth and then another, somewhat larger boost in 2018 to 2.5% growth. Not as good as Trump’s forecasts, but still on the positive side.

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At this very moment, a small handful of rogue companies are quietly creating armies of new millionaires. They’re doing it by producing things your mother warned you about: Products some claim are “sinful” … “forbidden” … even “scandalous.” Read more here …

Right now, though, after taking a second hard look, the IMF forecasters have completely dropped their assumptions about any benefits from the Trump plans. Instead, all they see are spending cuts that, if anything, will actually slow the U.S. economy down.

“We are removing that fiscal stimulus because now we have in front of Congress a budget that assumes an important fiscal consolidation in the next few years,” says Alejandro Werner, head of the IMF’s Western Hemisphere Department.

What about the 3% GDP growth that the White House was hoping for? “No way,” say the folks at the IMF.

Trump Trouble #2Massive Washington Gridlock

Last week, members of Congress came back from their Fourth of July weekend. They sniffed the legislative junkpile. And they puked.

The Obamacare repeal-and-replace bills — in shreds.

The federal budget resolution — smelling very fishy.

The debt ceiling bill — threatening to stink up the whole joint.

And tax-reform legislation — rotting in the hopper.

For anyone in Washington who wants to play the blame game and take some potshots, handy targets are everywhere:

The conservative Republicans say they’ve been thrown off course by Trump’s on-again-off-again support for their initiatives.

And both blame the Democrats for “blind opposition.”

But while some members point fingers, others simply despair that they’re running out of time. In fact, ten Republican senators are so frustrated by the gridlock, they’ve written an urgent letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to cancel the August recess:

Signatures of 10 U.S. Senators who fear they’re running out of time to pass urgent legislation this year.

“We are united in our belief that we must work with a sense of urgency to deliver conservative solutions for pressing legislative issues on behalf of the American people. Our current Senate calendar shows only 33 potential working days before the end of the fiscal year. This does not give us enough time to adequately address the issues that demand immediate attention. Therefore, we respectfully request that you consider truncating, if not completely foregoing, the scheduled August state work period, allowing us more time to complete our work.

“There are five imperatives which must be accomplished this year. We must complete the first phase of the Obamacare repeal and replace. Next, we have to pass a budget that serves as a reconciliation vehicle for reforming our outdated tax code. Before September 30th, we must agree on an appropriation that responsibly funds the government. Also, we must deal with our debt limit before that approximate date. If we can successfully navigate those priorities, we can finally get to our once in a generation opportunity on tax reform. Growing the economy, repairing our infrastructure, and rebuilding our military are all dependent on accomplishing the tasks before us.”

The obvious problem: The entire nation is divided, and extra time alone will not be enough to bring the warring parties into alignment.

Trump Trouble #3Consumer Confidence Starting to Decline

One of the big pluses in the early days of the new administration was a surge in confidence — not only on Wall Street but also among consumers. Trouble is, there are now signs that the euphoria could be fading.

According to the latest survey by the University of Michigan, U.S. consumer confidence has fallen to its lowest point since November. Why? Mainly because …

Democrats are worried about what President Trump is trying to do.

Republicans are worried that he can’t get it done.

And everyone seems frustrated by the process.

Overall, confidence is still relatively high. But unless Washington delivers, that’s not going to last very long.

The reality no one seems to want to confront: In the first three months of the year, the economy grew at a miserly annual pace of just 1.2%. If Washington can’t get anything done and the Fed continues raising rates, don’t be surprised if it slips into neutral, or worse.

That’s going to continue to slam traditional sectors like brick-and-mortar retail and autos.

And for investors, it means the time for throwing darts at the wall is over. Instead, be sure to zero in on select sectors that are enjoying their own, private bull markets regardless of the gridlock in Washington.

For specific instructions, be sure to watch your inbox for emails from two Weiss Research experts, Safe Money editor Bill Hall and natural resource expert Sean Brodrick. They’re on the verge of a major investment victory.

Good luck and God bless!

Martin

P.S. The New YorkTimes calls legal marijuana “The Next Gold Rush.” And now, industry insiders predict that legal marijuana will generate as much as $60 billion per year by 2020, making it larger than the computer and internet industries combined! Read more here …

Trump’s election has uprooted some long held assumption in the minds of Politicians about the way many Americans think and vote, this has them so scared of losing their next election they can’t make up their minds which way to vote on legislation.

Self preservation has the highest priority in Washington, but no action on needed legislation is bad as well.

Within my social circle, Senator, Alexander/Corker, Tennessee, are both on the chopping block come election time, these “Middle of the road” and “Don’t ruffel any feathers” Representatives who didn’t learn from Trump’s election that voters want a “Dam the torpedoes, full speed ahead” and “Drain the swamp” type of Representative, obviously are not intune with the people.

America is so divided right now armed conflict has a higher chance of becoming a reality than a 2-3% GDP growth.

The economy and the average citizen has always done better when led by Liberal Progressives….. 1982-2000 was brought by Paul Volcker, (not Reagan) who was hired by Carter. Reagan’s choice, “mumbles” Greenspan brought the Crash of 2007-2009 while Conservatives Cheney/bush were in office….. Does anybody with a brain really believe Trump’s ravings and twitters? Another Conservatve Crash like 1929 and 2007? This past history tells us it is a higher probability….. :(

Joe,
You need to so some study, rather than buying the Right Wind Bull Crap! Fortune Magazine and the New York Times: $10,000 invested after 1929 in only Conservatie (Republican) Administrations since 1929 would have only grown to Roughly $11,000 . Adjusted to inflation, you would be underwater.. Same amount invested only in Progressive Liberal (Democratic Adminstrations would have grown to roughly $400,000! Roughly the same number of both adminsitrations since 1929…

Ya, you see it took a lot of money to recover from the Republican’s Cheney/bush Crash and Depresseionof 2007 , just as it took a lot of money to recover from Republican Hoover’s Stock Market Crash and Depression of 1929

You are forgetting Volkernomics where he raised interest rates to loanshark levels to combat Carter’s stagflation. Then Republican Reagan arrived and within Two years the economy was booming. Also the cold war was being ended with real nuclear weapons cuts despite liberals accusing him if being a cowboy warmonger. I could go on to other presidencies but you’ve suffered enough embarrassment. Now go back and study like you tell everyone else to do.

Donald Trump is an outsider who came out of nowhere politics wise and promised to upset the apple cart which is what a lot of we the people wanted especially after eight years of Obama and his magic pen. But Hillary wa the queen of the insiders and for that reason should have won the election so the Democrats are crying in their beer. THe Republicans haven’t quite gotten their act or agenda together and they are likewise a bit upset with the Donald, he wasn’t their insider either. And then the liberal courts just can’t wait ti bring their agenda into the mess. Meanwhile in the real world we the people are getting upset with the whole stinking mess.

Cut taxes, increase military spending, spend a trillion on infrastructure, balance the budget……………. Great! Sign me up! While your at it send me $500 and I’ll send you my “All You Can Eat Diet Plan”, you can eat all the pizza, Mexican food, hamburgers, French fries, cake and ice cream you want, not exercise and lose weight. Or better yet call me at BR-549, operators are standing by!

The Republicans forgot why they got elected……because Trump wanted to bring change to the corrupt ways of Washingtons politics, which the majority of the people wanted.
Now its back to business as usual, and Republicans and of course Liberal politicians with the help of the liberal press will derail all of Trumps plans….. it’s back to the elite club of the McCains, Clintons, Obamas and all the other corrupt politicians, who weaseled themselves into politics and with it our money into their pockets.

Although I support President Trump’s choice in advisors, this article has some interesting highlights. I think if he or Romney could have been elected in ’12, we would have seen a turn around (sooner) and the landing would not be as hard as it’s going to be in the near future.

Does anybody really think that society’s problems will ever be corrected until Congress raises taxes for the 1% that owns 40% of the nation’s wealth and also cease spending America’s wealth on offensive military action in foreign nations?

We can complain, give opinions, snarl and sweat the problems of American politics. . . . as we sit on the sidelines and watch the bantering on CNN, MSNBC, ABC,CBS and FOX and more. . . . What should we do that can make a difference? Give more opinions? Wax cold on every politician both Democrats and Republican? Nope! . . . not me and my house we are going to – – – Proverbs 3:5 – 6
If you have a better answer – – – Go for it!

Doesn’t matter who is elected,if the majority of voters want something for nothing from govt and will vote for it.So,the welfare state grows while infrastructure rots.Hopefully China doesn’t follow U.S. and Europe and go into decline.

The economy had just crashed due to neoliberal ideology, and Obama is a neoliberal, too, or he wouldn’t have been elected, but his team, most of them left over from the Clinton administration, knew how to recover from Republican idiocy as they had to with what George H.W. Bush, running Reagan’s “voodoo economics” – neoliberalism – left them. Dubya left Obama with a crashed economy that the Fed managed to keep on high-dollar life support long enough for Democrats to once again bail out the fools of power.

It was the failure of neoliberalism, written in 1000 foot high letters across the sky, and nobody got it an now Trump is trying to try harder to make what failed before work this time. This is the behavior of an addict.

When you have $1Billion each election to spend on a bloodless coup that will get rid of the last democratic bone in the USA, you cause what we’ve got now. Say what you will, but if you heard it from the neoliberal noise machine, you heard ideology from the early 19th century (when Charles Dickens wrote about conditions almost exactly like we have in the US today) as if an anachronism stupid as a box of rocks – back then – could fit today.

No humans have ever before lived in an atmosphere loaded with 400 ppm of carbon pollution that’s there because when we found out (in the Nixon administration, and then inherited by President Carter) what we faced, we asked polluters to stop polluting and, instead, Corporate America fired up the never-before-successful lassiz-faire economics that Karl Polanyi carefully dissected in “The Great Transition.” The self-regulating economy is not just a myth, it’s an illusion, and illusions only work this good – fantastic for the upper classes and man-made Hell for everyone else, just like it was in the early 19th century. Dickens time.

Ideology is the ideas of dead people. We need ideas that fit today, and a willingness to learn from direct observation without filtering it through ideology to make it fit somone’s idea of Right Life.

It’s time we admitted that we were fleeced again, except this time the coup had such a superb propaganda component that the upper classes have more money than they know what to do with – enough money to “buy” other countries’ treasury, most recently Greece. To give them even more, Trump wants to throw a death sentence to 20 million of the poor, sick, and weak. This is a shining example of the moral stature of neoliberals.

In the Reagan administration, the government was put up for sale to the highest bidder then K Street suddenly blossomed. It’s hard to tell the truth about injustice when you want it to continue, so they didn’t, and haven’t, and probably won’t until after we reach 450 ppm and lose any chance of lessening the impact of global warming and the rest of the Sixth Mass Extinction, the one humans chasing money caused.

If anyone comes after us, our artifacts will show them a failed society that destroyed the natural world pursuing the human construction of money, made real only by an ideology that has never succeeded anywhere save an outright dictatorship, so that’s what our foreign policy spawns.

And we think that if we get rich enough, all our dreams will come true. Those dreams are purchased by sacrificing the future of life on Earth.

The hardest thing to admit is that you’ve been duped because those in control of the US economy discovered that their way of life resulted in no future, so what the Hell, let’s party down while we still can. Frat boy crap. It got our posterity’s future.

Your grandkids will live in Hell by 2050, thanks to Trump following the money that got him elected (if it wasn’t Russians – or Republicans – hacking intentionally insecure voting machines manufactured by Republicans) and doing what it wants. Republicans also own the server farms that tally the vote in the US. Handy, if you want to stay in power by whatever means it takes. Madison erred in putting the rich and wellborn in power.

Let the party continue!

Or we can make an attempt to save the future by switching to ecological economics and start acting as if the life support system means something meaningful.

I am British citizen born in ’41, and living in France
I enjoy reading your analyses which are succinct and clear. But let me ask you a question! Do you really think that TRUMP WILL MAKE IT TO the END OF HIS MANDATE. (I do not include assassination as an option)
I also had predicted his winning the election early on, because the majority of the poorer classes were tired of the old system and Trump just blew all that apart.
The snag now is that he seems totally limited in his ability to see things as they really are.
I am very happy with the outcome of the French elections and the chaos reigning in the old political parties today is a sign that a change was really needed. France also turned its back on the NationalFront (as in Holland) the British are finding out how “stupid and shortsighted” the Brexit vote was. Europe will not disappear as your column sometimes predicted, and I think the euro is climbing onto safer ground. Your comments are looked forward to. R R

The way the British common people see theTrump carry on,,Your Democrats truly lost a sown up decision and when Trump won,,their little heaven fell apart,,,so get over it,,,,we over here are sick to the teeth of hearing about whinging Democrats trying to kill off YOUR president,,If your truly American get behind your President,,,you will get your chance to change it in 4-5years time,,,So he may make a few boobs,,how many boobs have YOU made.Not behind your President and want a change NOW reminds us of facists

Well said, yes all leaders make mistakes. When we make mistakes from the head it’s Normal and human. When we make mistakes from the heart it’s intentional and needs criticism. The President faces a lot of opposition from the democrats who produce propaganda and try to undermine everything he does. We have a working President with a. Brilliant mind, something the democrats lack.

Martin you need a revolution and get rid of these neo-cons and the deep state, they control the money.
There is no free market, high frequency trading yes, these gangsters want a war with with Iran that completes Rothschild plan, 7 countries screwed?

Let’s see. May budget proposal. Today is July 10. You are showing great inpatients condemning an 8-10 year plan, two months after it’s proposal, that is being sabotaged at every opportunity by “patriotic dems”? I just had to point this out to balance what is obviously going on here. Truly pathetic.

The Senate leadership is largely responsible for this problem, by failing to comprehend that ordinary, common citizens, who possess less-than-average wealth, still want to help their country and have at their disposal, a means of doing that.

Bluntly put, when people get sick, their friends and family often join together to try to help them out.

It was from this fact, that there arose voluntary charitable associations, often affiliated with religious bodies, that built hospitals and clinics for this country’s poor. The money to run them came from gifts. Tax funds and politicians and insurance companies had no involvement, at the formative stages of this process, a century or more ago.

Because insurance executives are educated to think in terms of random events and statistical behavior, they ignore a crucial fact that’s absolutely necessary to understanding how healthcare works. Which is this: Most of the sickest people, developed a disease over many years, and share characteristics with others who also develop it.

Caregivers who are familiar with an illness can treat it better, than those unfamiliar with it. And the people with the most knowledge of their own symptoms…the patients…can provide insights into what they need, if anyone bothers to ask them.

So the right of patients to associate together according to their needs, and bargain collectively for the best possible treatment, is absolutely necessary if those patients are to get the best treatment at the best price.

That is being seriously proposed by some, including Sen Rand Paul of Kentucky.

And it’s being opposed by Senate leaders, who would rather bail out insurance companies, than allow patients to bargain with those companies for the best possible coverage.

Collective bargaining works in factories, because workers intimately know their own jobs, and how best to diminish the stress of working and get their jobs done.

Patients intimately know their own bodies, symptoms, and history. Preventive care will work best, when patients are empowered to seek it. Patients, after all, have a profound self-interest in their health: It’s painful or uncomfortable to be sick. To the insurer, it’s only a matter of money.

What might happen if every Mesothelioma patient in all 50 states, joined a collective bargaining unit and haggled with insurers to get the best possible price? Hospitals, nursing homes, doctors and other caregivers would have reasons to specialize in caring for those patients’ needs.

The present system, pioneered by Bill and Hillary Clinton, sought instead to divide the US into geographic regions, and promote “managed competition” between insurance firms that operated in those regions. The Clinton system is a failure. It has failed to improve care and it has failed to reduce costs. That’s because these geographic divisions have no relevance, to the illnesses people get, that cause them to need healthcare.

Voluntary associations of patients would do a much better job of controlling healthcare quality, and by removing the worst-quality providers from causing harm instead of healing, would reduce costs.

It is quite disturbing that the Democrats refuse to work with the Republican majority. Equally disturbing is the lack of leadership by McConnell and Ryan. Given Freedom Caucus representatives and people like Cruz and Lee an opportunity.

Mike,
I believe those are the same people who refused (and shut the government down) during Obama’s second term…. So NOW, you think the Democrats should play nice? Have you noticed that virtually everything that the GOP has tried to pass would result in their supporters, the Ultra Rich getting even richer and the rest of us 97% getting poorer? And you think we should support he GOP platforms? Are you for real?

Real growth is running about 1.5% or less now. With the Boomers retiring and productivity growth lower than it has been since the early 80s, it’s impossible to get the kind of growth that was trumpeted when Trump came into office. Real growth probably dropping to less than 1% in a couple years.

Unlike in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the demographics is not there. The US labor force will start shrinking in another year or two. And unlike in the 1930s, 1940s, 1980s, and 1990s, the productivity growth is not there. Too much capital has been squandered for a generation now on manias and fads > slowing productivity growth.

2016 was not a repeat of 1980. This is the fantasy I still hear from my Trump-supporting friends. Of course, Americans had bad choices in 2016: Hillary the Crook, Bernie the Antique Dinosaur, and The Donald, the reality TV celebrity. Something is very wrong with our politics.

Another name for liberal progressive is collect from the middle class and give it to the poor ignorant parasites. We need a major change in our two political parties that would rather quibble over the next election than drain the swamp by both outdated political parties that need to put America FIRST instead of lobbyist and special interests.

Study history. The greatest increase in the Middle Class in American history took place from 1932-1982 under mostly Liberal Progressive leadership. Since 1982 the Middle Class has gotten crushed under mostly Conservative Republican leadership….. The Republicans brought NAFTA and GATT which sent milliions of Middle Classs jobs overseas… They also brougt the removal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which brought the Crash of 2007-2009. In all fairness, Clinton mistakenly signed the last two, but the Republicans had a majority in Congress and could have overridden his veto…

Weiss indicates that this email will address the following : “What sectors are going to get hurt? Which ones will prosper regardless of Trump?” I must have missed something because I didn’t find the answers.

Eagle495 knows little history. So who signed in the Fed which is the cause of all these crashes? Who stole the citizens gold and built fort knox to store the stolen gold (stolen by law and paid about $20 an ounce and then revalued the ounce to $35)? Liberal leaders . Both sides have made big mistakes for your information. Two leaders have tried to fix the main problem and were shot for trying (one was killed). WWII created the condition for USA wealth and middle class prosperity not any leader. When other country’s manufacturing and farming are destroyed from war and USA is whole then USA has the means to sell and profit to other countries who need to rebuild their country.

My first comment. I voted for Trump and am disappointed that he has made little effort to “Drain The Swamp”. Cost cuts would be HUGE if he cut with a swath not a pin knife. Get rid of the FDA, the EPA, All connection with Education, all “nice-nice” projects like parks, social reform, etc. Cut the massive give-aways like food stamps, and support for the many people that would work if not given a free pass. Obama care should have been TOTALLY deleted, not “improved. Need I go on? Bah, humbug…

Trump took advantage of the divisions and the politics ofbresentment in this country and made a lot of half-promises he either knew he couldn’t keep or just didn’t realize “itcwould be so hard.” His administration–like the GOP–is only interested in breaking things so they can do what they want and pilfer the system. “Drain the swamp?” With six Goldman-sachs execs as sr. advisors? Not likely. The promises of more jobs has all been smoke and mirrors. He promised tax cuts *and* a trillion dollars in additional spending and a budget surplus. Didn’t any of his supporters do the math on that one? He also thought the GOP would just fall in line. How naive was that? We’re still n for a rough for years, if his inept and corrupt administration lasts that long.

The only place we’re going to get massive economic growth, is if cannabis legalization puts a new set of safe medicines in consumers’ hands, that relieve anxiety.

Hillary Clinton laid the foundation for tobacco companies to exit the market, without paying a penny of damages to the victims harmed by their cigarettes. Politicians got all the settlement money and blew it. Since then, the people who once smoked to relieve anxiety, either go to doctors for prescription meds, or suffer in silence. A handful still smoke, in the few places it is permitted.

Cannabis is more effective against anxiety than nicotine and has fewer side effects. Ten grams of nicotine will kill a 500-lb bear in minutes, from an immediate epileptic seizure. Ten grams of cannabis will make for a very tranquilized 100-lb human…and will prevent an epileptic seizure, even at much lower dosages. No one has ever died from an acute cannabis overdose…compare that to the bear-killing active ingredient in tobacco, and that’s a massive improvement in effectiveness and safety.

Anxiety doesn’t go away, just because Hillary Clinton took away the medicine for it. Just as chronic pain didn’t go away, when Clinton crony Dr Debra Houry concocted the imaginary “prescription opioid crisis”, distracting attention from the sales of counterfeit pain pills laced with Fentanyl, in chains of drug houses run by the Mexican crime cartels that already make huge illicit profits on methamphetamine and cocaine, and human trafficking. This cruel Clinton-Obama policy is stripping pain patients of legal pain medicine and driving those patients to dope houses, where they take the Fentanyl-laced stuff the cartels sell. Fentanyl, a synthetic drug the Cartels make from cheap industrial chemicals, is cheaper than smuggling opium and cocaine from abroad…the cheapness is the source of the cartels’ insane profits on this racket. The reason why no US Pharma company sells Fentanyl in pill form, is it can cause people to stop breathing. Pharma-produced prescription Fentanyl is sold to cancer hospices in transdermal patch form, so that at the first sign of breathing trouble, nurses can tear the patch off and stop further Fentanyl from getting into the patient.

Of course, the murderous crime cartels who’ve genocidally slaughtered 200,000 people in Mexico since their rise to power after 9-11-01 (Tight control of US airspace made their land smuggling routes the only route into the US for cocaine), do not concern themselves witb the safety of human life.

The uninsured American who cannot get to a doctor for prescription anti-anxiety meds, winds up using cannabis, which limits his or her career choices, because some workplaces prohibit it under a Federal statute.

Ending FDR’s federal prohibition of cannabis, will introduce badly-needed competition in the healthcare business. More importantly, it will free millions of job seekers to enter walled-off segments of the job market. Most importantly, it will erode the social stigma facing people who unjustly spent time in prison, solely for using cannabis to treat themselves for anxiety-related illness.

Cannabis improves functionality of many millions of people with neurological disease. It was used for 5.000 years for that purpose. Moses wrote in the Bible, a recipe he said that came from Almighty God, for a Holy Anointing Oil made from cannabis. (A translater working for King James of England, botched the translation…guessing that the Hebrew “kanah bohsem” didn’t mean Cannabis, but a French perfume indgredient called Calamus. Thanks to that goof, Christians didn’t object to cannabis prohibition.). Then in 1934, FDR decided he knew better, and prohibited all use of this medication.

Making more humans functional, and giving them access to the job market and capital markets, is a recipe for growth. And it quickly limits an important source of government costs: Prison cells for people who don’t belong there.

That’s a winning formula.

Senator Rand Paul backed Attorney General Sessions’ nomination, despite his previous anti-cannabis stances, because in Rand’s experience, Mr Sessions is open to learning from the evidence.

The evidence supports that federal cannabis prohibition should end immediately.

An economy is based on the continuous flow of money. I sell something; buy something from someone else; someone else buys something from another person etc. Money circulates throughout society; its measure being the velocity of money. Everyone ignores the velocity of money when it should be the number one indictor of the economy’s strength. Tax cuts in todays world will give the economy a temporary shot in the arm, but its long term effects will be disastrous. It doesn’t take a genius to figure this out; just someone with a little common sense. People get more money to spend because of the tax cuts. They buy something. Have you been to a store lately? Find anything made in the USA? I doubt it. Just about everything is produced offshore with a large percentage being Chinese. The extra money that people spend will go to two places: offshore and the deep pockets of CEO’s and investors. In both cases, the money will be taken out of the general circulation. There will be no long term improvement in the economy but there will be a large increase in US debt and debt servicing (dangerous grounds). China will probably use this influx of funds to increase their military capabilities (dangerous grounds). The first and only changes to the tax code should be designed to bring back offshored jobs and prevent more offshoring. Tax cuts without stipulations do neither. Only these steps will strength our economy.

No Administration or Congress can be assigned 100% blame or reward for what happens in the US. It’s all a group effort. Rarely are all 3 branches of government in the same party. Not only that, it takes time for new laws to impact the country, so there is significant lag time. Even if a president or Congress you love (or hate) passes a bill you love (or hate), it might take years for its effects to play out. And it will probably be the next Administration – or the one after that – that takes the blame or gets the credit. People want easy choices with instant results. People want politics to be a stark choice between good and evil – but it isn’t. It’s a choice between 2 ultra wealthy teams that argue over semantics and pretend to be our friend until they’re in power and then they seem to forget who put them there. Too much greed and laziness will be the downfall of America. All we can do is what Christ asked of us: work hard, love your fellow man, save more than you spend, plan for bad times and enjoy the good days when they come along.

it seems that eagle 495 has forgotten where his/her nest is. on 8th november 2016 the “american democratic system” voted to put trump into the pres. chair. end of story.

let him get on with it. if the elites are upset, shoot them, then we won’t hear from them again.

fair play is lost in america. any country that descends into the morass that u.s.a. is today is on a pathway to hell, mainly because of the players involved, and there are some real heavyweights in there throwing spanners into the works.. trump must have the hide of a rhinocerous to put up with all this tripe from demos. and others.

Gently and with no disrespect to anyone who has taken the time to make comments, I suggest ya all get on your knees and seek some advice from the God Almighty!

Nations and great civilizations come and go and HE, GOD has seen them all! HIS handI work is clearly seem in our, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA’S BIRTH AND GROWTH! AMERICA was founded by brave men and women who were steeped in His ways!

America’s generosity has been received by millions of folks since it’s birth! That generosity is still bei greceived